Spatial particle processes with coagulation: Gibbs-measure approach, gelation, and Smoluchowski equation

We study a spatial Markovian particle system with pairwise coagulation, a spatial version of the Marcus--Lushnikov process: according to a coagulation kernel K, particle pairs merge into a single particle, and their masses are united. We introduce a statistical-mechanics approach to the study of this process. We derive an explicit formula for the empirical process of the particle configuration at a given fixed time T in terms of a reference Poisson point process, whose points are trajectories that coagulate into one particle by time T. The non-coagulation between any two of them induces an exponential pair-interaction, which turns the description into a many-body system with a Gibbsian pair-interaction. Based on this, we first give a large-deviation principle for the joint distribution of the particle histories (conditioning on an upper bound for particle sizes), in the limit as the number N of initial atoms diverges and the kernel scales as 1/N K. We characterise the minimiser(s) of the rate function, we give criteria for its uniqueness and prove a law of large numbers (unconditioned). Furthermore, we use the unique minimiser to construct a solution of the Smoluchowski equation and give a criterion for the occurrence of a gelation phase transition.